Catherine. She felt the woman’s resentment like a draught of cold air behind her. She held still a shiver which seemed to walk from the base of her spine up to the cropped, cold nape of her neck. Then Lord Hugh’s heavy hand came comfortably on her shoulder and he leaned on her as she led him from the great hall, across the lobby behind it, and up to his room in the round tower.
He did not let her go until the door was shut behind them.
‘Now then,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen the she-dog, my daughter-in-law, and you’ve seen my son. D’you see now why I let you meet no one, why my food is tasted?’
‘You mistrust her,’ Alys said.
‘Damned right,’ the old lord said with a grunt. He slumped into the heavy carved chair at the fireplace. ‘I mistrust them both. I mistrust them all. I’m cold,’ he said fretfully. ‘Fetch me a rug, Alys.’
Alys took one of the fur-lined rugs from the bed and tucked it around his shoulders.
‘You have to sleep with her women,’ he said abruptly. ‘I can’t keep you here, it would make matters worse for you if they thought you were my whore. But you will keep your mouth shut about me and my business.’
Alys fixed her dark blue eyes on him and nodded.
‘And you will remember that it was I that sent for you, that it is I who command here, and that until I am dead you will be my clerk and servant and none other. My spy too,’ he said abruptly. ‘You can listen to her ladyship and tell me what she says of me, what she plans. And Hugo.’
‘And if I refuse?’ Alys asked, her voice so soft that he could not take offence.
‘You cannot refuse,’ he said. ‘You either consent to be my clerk, my spy, my cunning woman and my healer – or else I shall have you strangled and dumped in the moat. It’s your choice.’ He smiled wickedly. ‘A free choice, Alys, I won’t constrain you.’
Alys’ pale lovely face was as calm as a river on a sunny still day in June. ‘I consent,’ she said easily. ‘I will serve you in all that I can do – for I cannot make spells. And I will tell no one your business.’
The old lord looked hard at her. ‘Good,’ he said.
Alys’ knowledge of Latin was tested to its full extent by the letters the old lord sent all around England. He was seeking advice on how an annulment of Hugo’s and Catherine’s marriage would be greeted by his family, and by her distant kin. He suggested that she and Hugo – as second cousins – were in too close kinship, and that was why their marriage was barren, and should – ‘perhaps’, ‘possibly’, ‘mayhap’ – be annulled. His letters were a masterpiece of vague suggestion. Alys translated, and then translated again to hit upon the right tone of cautious inquiry. He was measuring the opposition he would face from his peers and rivals, and from the law.
He was also preparing his allies and his friends for his own death, smoothing the way for his son. He sent two very secret letters by special messenger to his ‘beloved cousins’ at Richmond Castle and York, commanding them to act if his death was sudden, if it looked like an accident, or if it had been caused by an illness which could be blamed on poisoning. He commanded them to seek evidence against his son’s wife; and he implored them to have her tried and executed if any evidence could be found or fabricated which pointed to her. He cast the darkest suspicions on her plans and on her feelings towards him.
If (as a possibility only he mentioned it to them), if the crime pointed to his son – they should ignore it. The inheritance of Hugo was more important than revenge, and besides, he would be dead by then and they would have no thanks from him. Alys, her eyes never lifting from the pages before her, realized that Catherine executed for murder was disposed of as neatly, and indeed more cheaply than Catherine set aside for barrenness. The old lord would not have died in vain if his death could be blamed on his daughter-in-law, his son set free to marry again, and a new Hugh born into the family.
Alys bent her cropped head over her writing as he dictated, and tried to translate blind and deaf, working without taking in the sense of what he was saying, scenting the dangers which surrounded him – and her with him – as a hare senses the hounds and cowers low. She learned for the first time that the land was ruled by a network of conniving, conspiring landlords answerable only to each other and to the King himself. Each of them had one ambition only: to retain and improve the wealth and power of his family; and that could only be done by expanding the boundaries of their manors – and willing it intact to the next heir and the heir after him.
Alys, her quill pen scratching on the downstrokes on the good-quality vellum, realized that the conception of Hugo’s son, the old lord’s grandson, was not a personal matter between Hugo and his shrewish wife, not even a family matter between the old lord and his son. It was a financial matter, a political matter. If Hugo inherited and then died childless the Lordship of Castleton would be vacant, the manors would be broken up among buyers, the family history and crest revert to the King and be sold to the highest bidder, and the great northern family would fall, its history at an end, its name forgotten. Someone else would live in the castle and claim castle, crest and even family history for their own. For Lord Hugh that prospect was the deepest terror in the world; another family in his place would deny that he had ever been. Alys heard his fear in every line he dictated.
He wrote also to the court. He had a hoard of treasure from Alys’ wrecked abbey to be sent south as a gift for the King. The inventory Alys translated was a masterpiece of sleight of hand, as gold candlesticks were renamed silver or even brass, and heavy gold plates disappeared from the list. ‘We did the work, after all, Alys,’ he said to her one day. ‘It was my Hugo that wrecked the abbey, doing the King’s work with patriotic zeal. We deserve our share.’
Alys, listing the silver and the gold which she had polished and handled, remembering the shape of the silver chalice against the white of the altar cloth and the sweet sacred taste of the communion wine, ducked her head and continued writing.
If I do not escape from here, I shall go mad, she thought.
‘It went wrong at the nunnery,’ Lord Hugh said. His voice held only faint regret. ‘The King’s Visitors told us that the nuns were corrupt and Father Stephen and Hugo went to see the old abbess and persuade her to pay fines and mend her ways. Everywhere else they had been, the nuns or the monks had handed over their treasures, confessed their faults, and Hugo used them kindly. But the old abbess was a staunch papist. I don’t believe she ever recognized the King’s right to set aside the Dowager Princess Catherine of Aragon.’ Lord Hugh said the title carefully. He had called her Queen Catherine for eighteen years and he was careful not to make a slip even when Alys was his only listener. ‘She took the oath to acknowledge Queen Anne but I am not sure how deep it went with her.’
He paused. ‘She would not discuss her faith with Father Stephen, not even when he charged her with laxity and abuses. She called him an ambitious young puppy.’ Lord Hugh snorted in reluctant amusement. ‘She insulted him and faced him down and threw them both out – my Hugo and Father Stephen. They came home like scolded boys. She was a rare woman, that abbess.’ He chuckled. ‘I’d have liked to meet her. It’s a shame it all went wrong and she died.’
‘How did it go all wrong at the nunnery?’ Alys asked. She was careful to keep her voice light, casual.
‘Hugo was drunk,’ the old lord said. ‘He was
